The Same Oh, But Different Meanings in Shopaholic & Sister and Its Thai-Translated Version

Abstract

This paper identifies the broad spectrum of feelings expressed by the primary interjection oh and the range of procedures that Ploy Chariyaves used to render them into Thai from a widely-read chick lit novel, Shopaholic & Sister written by Sophie Kinsella. To carry out the study, the types of feelings proposed by Drzazga (2021) are used to analyze a total of 190 instances of oh. The analysis reveals that the interjection provides an extensive array of 25 feelings that includes fear, recognition, uncertainty, surprise, nervousness, shock, excitement, disappointment, embarrassment, continuation, awareness, happiness, relaxation, negation, preceding description, certainty, dissatisfaction, sympathy, annoyance, response, preceding greeting, satisfaction, disagreement, sadness, and pain. Furthermore, the translation strategies recommended by Boonterm (2019) are adopted to consider how the instances of oh are translated are adopted to consider. The consideration shows that the translator employs five main translation procedures, namely primary interjection, omission, interjection phrase, secondary interjection, and question. More specifically, the procedure used most frequently is translating into primary interjection making up 90 percent. The findings suggest that conveying various emotions through the instances and retaining the primary interjection in the target text enable the story to be delightful and grab readers' attention.